I’m a church volunteer, stay at home mom, financial coach, blogger and author.

In case you don’t know what a financial coach is, a financial coach works with a client to change behaviors around money. That might be helping a client see where they can reduce spending or earn more income to create more savings. A financial coach helps to create a plan to get out of debt. Sometimes it’s important to help understand a client’s emotions around money, which may have created obstacles to good financial management in the past.

I wrote my book, “Family Gratitude Journal” as a way to battle the entitled feeling that is so pervasive in our culture. I created it for all ages, from children to seniors, and have heard great things from so many people! It’s especially important to focus on joy and gratitude when you are cutting back your lifestyle to become debt free.

After recently completing a bible study, I was motivated to start keeping a gratitude journal and wanted to include my family. However, I didn’t know how to go about it and was concerned that my children, ages 9 and 11, would simply repeat a list each night!

I decided to create a guided journal that would make them think and encourage a range of answers. I made it flexible for our schedules, so we wouldn’t feel guilty for not doing it everyday. I wanted to lead them into an attitude of gratitude by having them acknowledge all the little joys in their lives.

I believe that this book is unique because it is accessible for all ages and provides fodder for uplifting family sharing. It is a good value (it better be if it’s offered by a financial coach) because unlike many similar gratitude journals it does not expire in a year (you date each entry on your own timeline) and each entry guides you through a specific gratitude oriented thought process (unlike journals that simply ask “what are you grateful for?”)

I came to California in 2000 with an environmental engineering degree from the University of Michigan (UofM) and a job as an auto show spokesmodel. I lived in Huntington Beach for several sunny years - enjoying the boardwalk and surf culture; interacting in the community with the Newport Beach Jaycees, OC UofM alumni club and working as both an environmental engineer and an actress. In the midst of this busy schedule I decided to add: getting a Masters degree in Public Relations at Cal State Fullerton to consolidate my disparate careers.

However, once I got my Masters degree I realized that I had been prioritizing my career falsely - I really wanted to have a family and be a stay at home mom. So, I changed my focus from career building to finding Eric, my husband! We married in 2005 and I moved south along the coast to beautiful Carlsbad.

We had a lot of fun playing beach volleyball, remodeling our house, traveling, and spoiling ourselves. We were in a hurry to start a family, but sadly, like so many older couples, we needed expensive IVF. We happily spent the money (and now have two beautiful children ages 9 and 11).

Due to a combination of overspending, bad luck, poor decisions, and medical issues - we were struggling to pay the bills. Eric made a great income but we spent everything we made plus a little bit more every year. Financial worries were adding stress to our lives. And our lives were already stressed - normal stuff from having toddlers and a traveling husband; multiple medical issues for our daughter who was born pre-maturely at 24 weeks; plus dealing with sometimes crippling grief from the death of her twin sister (she was 10 days old).

We were holding on but it was often painful.

When I was pregnant with our youngest, we started looking for a church with a great children’s program. I grew up in a church, and wanted to make sure that my children had that same firm foundation. One day we found a flyer for Daybreak Church’s “Eggapalooza” - an Easter themed over-the-top event in Carlsbad that was awesome! It was a joyful experience and we felt like we found ‘our’ church.

I jumped into volunteering in the children’s ministry and making friends. My husband and I signed up for enrichment classes (but took them separately because of baby issues). Eric took the “Bibles for Dummies” class while I took the money class, “Financial Peace University” (FPU).

FPU was devastating. It made me truly realize how badly off we were financially.

I had convinced myself that we didn’t have credit card debt because I would frequently pay the credit card bills down to zero. But, sometimes I had to pay them off with our taxes or sometimes using our home-equity line of credit. We even refinanced the house. Twice.

Once, during the first class we were asked, “how much debt do you have?” I was pretty smug about not having a credit card problem.

We did have that home equity line of credit, often known as a second mortgage. We had used it to pay off medical bills, school loans, an IRS penalty, and those occasional credit cards. We thought we were pretty smart to have consolidated it all and at a low interest rate, too!

In my mind, at that moment, I thought debt was just credit cards. I hadn’t included our two car payments or the big home equity line of credit. I started to cry when I realized that we really owed over $100k plus the house.

Fast forward a little. I repeated the class with Eric attending. Once we were on the same page, we were able to agree to hate our debt and vowed together to make changes. We learned to communicate about our spending and created a working budget that limited our spending to (gasp) only what we made. We made paying off our debt a huge portion of our budget.

Within the next four years we paid off $110,000 and became debt-free except for our mortgage. We were so excited and empowered by gaining control of our finances that during that journey we became volunteer facilitators for the class and have now helped hundreds of people in our community take control of their finances. We are starting our 12th class this fall of 2018. This year, two of my past students paid off all of their debt too!

Helping people was what I had always wanted to do. That’s why I had gone into environmental engineering back in my idealistic youth. Leading FPU in our community helped us to stay focused and helped people learn to handle their money. Because I found the process of seeing peoples lives being changed so rewarding, I wanted to go deeper into the whole process, and decided to become a financial coach.

I went to Dave Ramsey‘s headquarters in Tennessee and took his Financial Coach Master Training seminar in February of 2017. My goal was to become a financial coach and help people in a one-on-one format by providing in depth analysis and restructuring of their finances.

That process of education (classes, homework, reading assignments, mentoring program) was electrifying! My mind shifted into overdrive and I was fired up! My husband recollects that he saw my happiness levels soar during this time.

I have always loved learning. And teaching. After the coaching education I realized how much I needed to still learn and taught myself some basic web-design, blogging, graphics, marketing, and social media. Thank goodness for easy to use programs like Canva and Wix! Then I saw a need for this journal and I started to research publishing. And, here we are!

Thanks for your time, and for reading my story. If you have financial issues I want to encourage you that you can change your story, too! PM me and we can talk. :)

God bless. Theresa